Talk:HOWTO Dual Monitors

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[edit] WindowManager support

Might be nice to have a section about which windowmanagers have nice support for dual-head use, for example whether they have any good way of handling disconnecting one of the monitors.

[edit] MergedFB

Might be nice to mention MergedFB on this page. Links:

[edit] Misc

I wanted to ask something, i don't know if this is the right place, since i just joined this page, but i think it's an interesting question: My setup is an AGP Matrox G550DH and a PCI S3 Trio64 Gx/Vx. I have to initialize the PCI 1st in BIOS or it won't work, but it's ok. So i have an 15" SVGA Display on S3, an 15" SVGA on 1st Matrox vout. Then i have aa Generic TV on 2nd Matrox vout with Matrox's tv-out adapter (it's just a cable with a resistor between 2 pins, outputing to s-video/rca @ 50hz). This works fine in windows, but i wanted it to it to work in linux also. The 1st monitor is capable of 1024x768@60hz, the 2nd 1024x768@75hz and the TV 640x480@50hz. Can anybody help me? Thanks!

Thanks a lot! My "NV18GL [Quadro4 NVS AGP 8x]" worked with two monitors 5 minutes after finding/reading this howto! Great!

Wonderful instructions! For ubuntu my xorg.conf was at /etc/X11/. Instructions for running configure are in xorg.conf. When I ran the configure program (dpkg-reconfigure), it rewrote xorg.conf with the new card's info, and copied the old card's info to a dated version of the file. It just took merging the two versions, per the HowTo instructions. Specs for the file are located under each release at wiki.x.org (here is where the latest xorg.conf spec lives).

may 7 2006:

"With the way I have the X configuration set above"

Who are "you" and which configuration are you refering to. "above" contains configurations for nvidia, ati, matrox, and more, each with different options such as twin view. without knowing what configuration "you" added, its difficult to determine what needs to be done.

For instance, i have an nvidia 6800. i want to run an X session on each (of 2) screen, each with a different color depth and resolution. Currently i'm using twinview. i don't know how to change my configuration to the "above" one.

Is it possible to run two screens on a dualhead nvidia independently of each other? What I'd like to have is start my normal X server, then start another one on my TV that I can use the same as a separate VT single screen, but always visible. I've tried this by putting 2 layouts in xorg.conf, but running the second server it says there's no display device.


[edit] Proprietary ATI options

http://debian.wgdd.de/temp/fglrx_man/fglrx.4x.html

I added a link to these directly into the page, I hope this is ok since there seems a small [doubt] about the legality of collating this info. I'm in the Netherlands and sure it is legal here, YMMV.

For me this is the 'Missing link' to getting it all working on a system which has a VIA KT400 motherboard with a 8x AGP card, this does not play well; the GPU dies a few seconds after any 3D rendering starts.

This issue is discussed [here], I needed to set my AGP to 4x from 8x and these options provide the mechanism. Tore my hair out finding this, I knew what I wanted to do (I had originally found this solution under windoze) but could not find a way to force 4x.

EasyTarget 13:06, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Matrox and Modular Xorg

The directions were great for getting my new Matrox 450 working. The only hiccup I had, was caused by needing to emerge the Matrox driver, since I (along w/ the rest of gentoo) moved to modular Xorg.

emerge -av x11-drivers/xf86-video-mga

[edit] nvidia non-twinview disadvantages

My README file (/usr/share/doc/nvidia-drivers-1.0.9631/README.gz) reads: 

Graphics chips that support TwinView (Appendix G) can also be configured to
treat each connected display device as a separate X screen.

While there are several disadvantages to this approach as compared to TwinView
(e.g.: windows cannot be dragged between X screens, hardware accelerated
OpenGL cannot span the two X screens), it does offer several advantages over
TwinView:

   o If each display device is a separate X screen, then properties that may
     vary between X screens may vary between displays (e.g.: depth, root
     window size, etc).

   o Hardware that can only be used on one display at a time (e.g.: video
     overlays, hardware accelerated RGB overlays), and which consequently
     cannot be used at all when in TwinView, can be exposed on the first X
     screen when each display is a separate X screen.

   o TwinView is a fairly new feature. X has historically used one screen per
     display device.

Note the last point is different from the current article. I am using a non-twinview setup and I _can_ drag windows between my monitors, my OpenGL screensaver spans both screens and I'm pretty sure it is accelerated. So none of the disadvantages seem real. --HkBst 16:40, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I guess this is mentioned in the Xinerama section. Maybe I should fix this scattering of info. --HkBst 16:44, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Moving focus between screens

Both links to "switchscreen-0.4.tar.gz" seem to be broken. Google turned up nothing, so I wrote my own program to switch focus. 

#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <X11/Xlib.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
        if (argc != 2) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Usage: shiftfocus <DISPLAY>\n");
                return EINVAL;
        }
        Display* display = XOpenDisplay(argv[1]);
        if (display == NULL) {
                fprintf(stderr, "Failed to open display\n");
                return EINVAL;
        }
        XSetInputFocus(display, XDefaultRootWindow(display),
                RevertToPointerRoot, CurrentTime);
        XCloseDisplay(display);
        return 0;
}

Save this as "shiftfocus.c" and compile it with "gcc -o shiftfocus -lX11 shiftfocus.c"
It takes one argument, an X display name. Running "shiftfocus :0.0" will give focus to the root window on the first display, "shiftfocus :0.1" will focus the second, etc.

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